Cognizant of the fact grabbing guns from law-abiding citizens will not stop psychos from engaging in mass shootings, former Homeland Security boss Michael Chertoff believes government should hone its ability to spot criminals and terrorists before they inflict damage on society.

“We need to understand more about the signs that show somebody is either becoming deranged or becoming a terrorist, because there’s a commonality we see again and again, which is a sudden change in behavior, usually some element of becoming more isolated and changing the way you relate to people,” Chertoff said over the weekend on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Chertoff tried to link the Aurora shooting to Muslim terrorism by mentioning Major Hasan.

“The question there again was how come Major [Nidal Malik] Hasan was not detected earlier before the horrible shootings in Fort Hood,” he said. “It was, in a sense, a failure of imagination. Here’s somebody who was getting radicalized, who was communicating with a terrorist over the internet and yet the people looking at that somehow they couldn’t get their heads around the assumption that somehow because he was an army officer, he couldn’t be turning in a bad direction. So we need to rethink our approach to this.”

Hasan supposedly connived with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Pentagon dinner guest allegedly killed in Yemen by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command.

The Aurora and Fort Hood shootings have absolutely nothing in common – except they are both mass killings – but this is irrelevant for the opportunist Chertoff who is more interested in pushing his neocon agenda of forever war against the enemies of Israel. He also has a financial interest in the war against manufactured enemies – his security consulting agency, Chertoff Group, includes a client that manufactures porno scanners for locked-down airports in the United States.

Chertoff has a vested interest in keeping the lucrative war on terror going for as long as possible and may get the opportunity in November. In 2011, he was invited to join a select number of fellow neocons – including Robert Kagan, Eliot Cohen, Dan Senor and other Bush era leftovers – as candidate Romney’s foreign policy “advisory team.”

Despite Chertoff’s obsession with the completely overblown threat posed by radicalized Muslims, the Department of Homeland Security has moved to incorporate precrime in its modus operandi and the shootings in Colorado may work in its favor.

In October, Declan McCullagh reported that a program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime was being tested.

Earlier in 2011, we reported on efforts by the DHS to subject Americans to precrime interrogations and physiological scans to detect “malintent” at sports stadiums, malls, airports and other public places.

The precrime schemes are an expansion of the “See Something, Say Something” program rolled out by the mega-agency. The creepy program is ominously akin to efforts by East Germany’s Stasi to turn citizens into stool pigeons.

Likewise, Chertoff’s suggestion that officialdom somehow ferret out “deranged terrorists” and other malcontents is not a serious effort to put an end to mass murder, but it is part of a political agenda (in Chertoff’s case, keeping the Islamic jihadist threat myth alive).

Beyond the Muslim threat, the state is interested in finding “deranged” political opponents before they exercise their First Amendment right to seek a redress of grievances and other terrorist solutions to tyranny.

Chertoff and the establishment know it is virtually impossible to prevent lunatics from engaging in public mass murder. Instead, they are moving to create a framework of surveillance and a network of “see something, say something” informants that will be used for political purposes under the transparent guise of protecting innocents from terrorists.